Pawn and Controller design when the number of units is very high

Development Programming & Scripting
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I am creating a builder style game which will have lots of units moving around the map. These units are never posessed by the player and simply move from location to location to perform tasks.

Learning about UE, it seems these units would be best as Pawns, and I would spawn an AIController to move each Pawn.

Immediately this has me questioning my choice of engine for this style of game, because ideally I’d have one class managing a high number of units in a game where optimisation is very important. Here 1000 pawns would need 1000 AIControllers, which sounds concerning.

Am I misunderstanding the situation, or does this design setup suggest UE is better suited to other game types?

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Hi FBryant, Welcome to the Forums,

I’ve never implemented it, but I think that the new Mass AI system is built for cases like this.

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This is very useful thank you!

The project in that video looks extremely helpful but it’s a real shame they don’t provide the source code. I was wondering if Mass is considered experimental still or ‘released’.

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The city sample project uses mass for the car traffic and pedestrians.

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You’re welcome!

If you link your Github, I think you’d be able to see the source code for everything. (Engine + Plugins)

If you go to Edit → Plugins you’ll see the list of plugins. Mass AI is listed as Experimental as of 5.4